In an unnamed New York-based company, the employees are getting restless as everything around them unravels. There’s Pru, the former grad student turned spreadsheet drone; Laars, the hysteric whose work anxiety stalks him in his tooth-grinding dreams; and Jack II, who distributes unwanted backrubs–aka “jackrubs”–to his co-workers. On a Sunday, one of them is called at home. And the Firings begin. Rich with Orwellian doublespeak, filled with sabotage and romance, this astonishing literary debut is at once a comic delight and a narrative tour de force. It’s a novel for anyone who has ever worked in an office and wondered: “Where does the time go? Where does the life go? And whose banana is in the fridge?” Praise for PERSONAL DAYS "Witty and appealing...Anyone who has ever groaned to hear 'impact' used as a verb will cheer as Park skewers the avatars of corporate speak, hellbent on debasing the language....Park has written what one of his characters calls 'a layoff narrative' for our times. As the economy continues its free fall, Park's book may serve as a handy guide for navigating unemployment and uncertainty. Does anyone who isn't a journalist think there can't be two books on the same subject at the same time? We need as many as we can get right now." — The New York Times Book Review "Never have the minutiae of office life been so lovingly cataloged and collated." —"Three First Novels that Just Might Last," — Time A "comic and creepy début...Park transforms the banal into the eerie, rendering ominous the familiar request "Does anyone want anything from the outside world?" — The New Yorker "The modern corporate office is to Ed Park's debut novel Personal Days what World War II was to Joseph Heller's Catch-22 —a theater of absurdity and injustice so profound as to defy all reason....Park may be in line to fill the shoes left by Kurt Vonnegut and other satirists par excellence." —Samantha Dunn, Los Angeles Times "In Personal Days Ed Park has crafted a sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always adroit novel about office life...Sharp and lovely language." — Newsweek "A warm and winning fiction debut." — Publishers Weekly "I laughed until they put me in a mental hospital. But Personal Days is so much more than satire. Underneath Park's masterly portrait of wasted workaday lives is a pulsating heart, and an odd, buoyant hope." — Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan "The funniest book I've read about the way we work now." –William Poundstone, author of Fortune's Formula "Ed Park joins Andy Warhol and Don DeLillo as a master of the deadpan vernacular." —Helen DeWitt, author of The Last Samurai This comic and creepy début novel takes place in a Manhattan office depopulated by "the Firings," where one can "wander vast tracts of lunar workscape before seeing a window." The downsized staff huddle like the crew of a doomed spaceship, picked off one by one by an invisible predator. Crippled by computer crashes (one worker suggests that the machines are "trying to tell us about the limits of the human"), the survivors eddy in a spiritual inertia; when one of them is banished to "Siberia"a lone desk on another floorno one can muster the energy even to reply to her increasingly anguished e-mails, until, one day, she is simply no longer there. Park transforms the banal into the eerie, rendering ominous the familiar request "Does anyone want anything from the outside world?" Copyright ©2008 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker "Park manages to articulate a narrative point of view you might call first-person corporate -- which, incidentally, he marshals throughout the whole of Personal Days to great effect, giving new impetus and texture to Dilbertian anomie. The resonances with Tretyakov's biography of the object are obvious; but whereas Tretyakov points toward overcoming workers' alienation, Park simply characterizes such alienation in terms consistent with 21st-century work life. Tretyakov imagines a novel without a hero. Park imagines one without a reader." -- The New Inquiry Ed Park is a founding editor of The Believer and a former editor of the Voice Literary Supplement . He has taught writing at Columbia University, where he received his M.F.A. He lives in New York. Chapter 1 Who died? On the surface, it’s relaxed. There was a time when we all dressed crisply, but something’s changed this summer. Now while the weather lasts we wear loose pants, canvas sneakers, clogs. Pru slips on flip-flops under her desk. It’s so hot out and thus every day is potentially casual Friday. We have carte blanche to wear T-shirts featuring the comical logos of exterminating companies, advertising slogans from the early ’80s. Where’s the beef? We dress like we don’t make much money, which is true for at least half of us. The trick is figuring out which half. We go out for drinks together one or two nights a week, sometimes three, to take the edge off. Three